IndPlan

Goals as Instructional Coach 1. Get away from my some of my non-instructional duties and work with teachers in classroom and collaborative meetings. Allocate a block of time to daily duties such as gradebook questions, edline questions, and blendedschools OPC work to make more time for instructional coaching 2. Identify some teachers and activities that can serve as examples for the staff. 3. Take some existing “projects” and ramp them up to truly creative PBL activities. 4. Develop a “showcase” site where teachers can catalog their work, get ideas, share ideas and see some best practices from inside and outside our building. Challenges 1. Style vs. substance – too much focus on the “tools” and not enough on what the learning is supposed to be a. Utilize examples from coaches meetings and within our school o highlight the importance of the learning and the reduce emphasis on the tools. b. When working with teachers look at the essential questions and the teacher’s objectives before looking at the tools 2. PD is often a waste of individual’s time a. Look to our “design your own day” model of PD and work with teachers to get the most from the day b. Work with principal to bring back the best practices during faculty meetings so that time is spent giving ideas of what it should look like What would school look like? 1. I would hope that as I walked the halls of he school I would not see classrooms of parallel rows of students watching a teacher “perform” at the front of the room. Instead, I would see clusters of desks with students working on inquiry based projects and collaborative activities. Realistically I know that content delivery is an important part of high school teaching, I hope to see less didactic instruction and more individualized instruction. 2. Technology would be an important part of the school, however the focus would be on teaching and learning and NOT on the tools. Web 2.0 activities such as Glogster and Animoto would not be the end product of an activity, but one step in the process of developing learning. Using a tool does not equate to good teaching or learning. Promethean boards would be places where various media would serve different learning styles rather than being a source of entertainment or engagement (short-lived engagement at best). 3. The learning environment would extend beyond the classroom as students would use online learning and online content to continue learning after classroom instruction was over. Students would be held responsible for more of the basic content via online delivery.